David Klinghoffer and His Critics: An Exchange

As a member of the Editorial Board of First Things since its inception, I protest
the publication of David Klinghoffer’s "Anti-Semitism
Without Anti-Semites" (April). . . . The article is nothing less than
evil—evil, not just misguided, because its intent is clearly to hurt, and without
any greater, justifiable end to permit its angry words. . . . The evil of this
article comes across on three different levels: political, moral, and theological—especially
theological.

On the political level, which means the context of one’s rhetoric, the
fact is that the overwhelming majority of First Things’ readers and contributors
are Christians. Nevertheless, First Things is deeply committed to Jewish-Christian
dialogue in the most serious and far-reaching way. Because of that commitment,
it has sought more Jewish readers and encourages Jewish thinkers to write
for it. And, especially as concerns Jewish authors, the journal has provided
a very significant medium for bringing Jewish voices into the public discussion
of the major religious and political issues in our society. I would venture
to say that many of the readers of First Things have received their first
taste of intelligent, religiously committed Jewish thought on issues that
concern them from the pages of this journal. And, writing for this journal
has enabled some contemporary Jewish thinkers to retrieve important aspects
of Jewish social teaching in ways heretofore unavailable to us. The community
of discourse that the Institute on Religion and Public Life and First Things
have established has also elevated Jewish-Christian dialogue to unprecedented
levels. That achievement must be guarded and nurtured. It cannot be taken
for granted—ever.

Some might object that Mr. Klinghoffer’s critique of widespread theological
indifference among Jews today, even among many religiously observant Jews
(my late revered teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel used to call them "religious
behaviorists"), is rhetorically unwise in that it "washes dirty
linen" of the Jews before the Gentiles. But that is not my objection.
If Jews are part of the public square, they can hardly expect the luxury
of that kind of sectarian anonymity. After all, First Things is not at
all reticent to publish Christian critiques of other Christians—and rightly
so. Were Mr. Klinghoffer’s critique of too frequent invocation of the Holocaust
by many Jews confined to the moral level, I would find much with which
to agree. Talking about the Holocaust should take the form of addressing
a great moral problem, not invoking it as a moral conclusion for unquestioned
prejudices and political agendas (petitio principii). But Mr. Klinghoffer
has done more than that. He has argued that the Holocaust is God’s direct
punishment for "our disobedience."

Now, despite official Church repudiations of the ancient charge against
the Jews of "deicide," the truth is that there are still many
Christians, including some (I hope not very many) First Things readers,
who, even if they do not think the Jews guilty of deicide per se, still
judge the Jews sinful for having rejected Jesus of Nazareth as the
Christ, instead of leaving that judgment to God in the end time. And there
is much in Christian tradition to bolster the view that Jewish suffering
throughout history is therefore deserved. (Though it is true that the increasing
amount of anti-Christian persecution today has disabused many Christians
of that kind of easy, triumphalist thinking. Many Christians now know what
it is like to be "Jews" in a hostile world.)

David Klinghoffer, sophisticated journalist that he is, is certainly
aware of his audience. Why did he choose to write this piece for a readership,
some of which at least, will agree with his theological conclusions because
of their own anti-Judaism? That is giving aid and comfort to those
who would still delegitimatize Judaism and the Jewish people. That is evil
for any Jew, especially a religiously observant Jew like Mr. Klinghoffer.

Of course, where else could Mr. Klinghoffer have published such a piece?
No Jewish journal that I know of would have accepted it. The only segment
of the Jewish people who thinks it knows why God let the Holocaust happen
to his people is the Satmar Hasidic community. In a tightly argued and
meticulously researched theological treatise, the late Satmar Rebbe (who
had greater than papal authority in his community) Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum
claimed that the Holocaust is God’s punishment for the sins of the Jewish
people, specifically those of the very "Reformers and secularists"
whom Klinghoffer indicts. The fact that many more Hasidim than "Reformers
and secularists" were killed only indicated to Rabbi Teitelbaum the
force of the collective punishment that Mr. Klinghoffer embraces. And,
furthermore, the worst sin of all this reform and secularism for Rabbi
Teitelbaum is Zionism.

On this point, though, Mr. Klinghoffer is curiously silent. (The only
hint of perhaps some anti-Zionism . . . comes out in his assertion that
in America "there is probably less hostility to Jews than in any country
anywhere, including the State of Israel, at any time in history.")
Could it be that this type of anti-Zionism would not sit well with the
political agenda of Mr. Klinghoffer’s employer, the National Review?
For Zionism, even when advocated by religious Jews, is clearly an acceptance
of a great deal of secularity (not to be confused with ideological secularism),
and that is something political conservatives today (however religious)
also embrace. Only Christian "theocrats" (who think quite similarly
to the Satmar Hasidim) would disagree. Mr. Klinghoffer could, of course,
practice what he preaches and become a Satmar Hasid. But, alas, Satmar
Hasidim do their writing in Hebrew or Yiddish, meant only for the eyes
of others who share their world of discourse. And I can’t imagine the Satmar
community allowing one of their own to work for a non-Jewish journal (or
for even just about any Jewish journal) like the National Review—or
to write for First Things.

Klinghoffer’s audience, then, seems to be predominantly Christian and
mostly conservative politically. (Note how he considers Jewish concern
with the utterances of "Pat Buchanan or Pat Robertson" to be
"obsessive"—another Jewish sin, I guess.) This is not the audience
that a Jew like David Klinghoffer should be talking to about Jewish sins.
For on the religious level, many in this audience still believe that the
Jewish sin is remaining Jews and not becoming Christians; and on the political
level, many in this audience think it is a "sin" that so few
Jews have moved to the right in their political views.

On the moral level, Mr. Klinghoffer’s tirade is most evidently cruel.
I shudder to think what my friend Sol, with the numbers tatooed on his
arm in Auschwitz and who sits next to me every morning in the synagogue,
would say to me about my connection to First Things if he read what David
Klinghoffer has said about the murdered Jews of the Holocaust in its pages.
And Sol’s feelings as a direct survivor are only different in degree not
in kind from all Jews alive today who are less direct survivors. Since
Mr. Klinghoffer is so biblically oriented, he should remember what the
Lord said to the "friends" of Job (Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar)
about their conclusion from the suffering of Job that he must have sinned
to deserve it. "My anger is kindled against you . . . for you have
not spoken the truth about Me as has My servant Job" (Job 42:7). Even
if one knew the sins of one who is suffering, that sin is not to be exposed.
Our moral task is to resist the evil that was the immediate cause of the
suffering of the Holocaust (Nazism), and help bind up its wounds that are
very much still with us.

That does not mean we are to be morally oblivious to the Holocaust.
But our reflection on it can only be prospective, not retrospective. Thus
we are obligated to ponder what we can learn from it, not in order to prevent
anything similar from happening again—that is beyond much of our control—but
to consider what it means for our actions here and now into the future.
Here Mr. Klinghoffer could have made a very valid moral point, which is
that Jews who are alive today, all of whom are survivors by definition,
should ponder this: Just what we are to be surviving for? Too much
Jewish talk today simply accepts survival for survival’s sake, or as Emil
Fackenheim would have us believe, we are to survive so as not to hand Hitler
any posthumous victories. But if that is the case, then Jews actually need
a mortally threatening enemy to give them a reason to survive. (Everyone
needs a reason to survive, the will to live not being at all self-evident).
And that is the moral bankruptcy of "victimology," a disease
not peculiar to Jews. Had Mr. Klinghoffer taken that line, he would have
had good moral guidance to give his fellow Jews. For he certainly believes
that Jews are to live for God’s sake, which means being faithful to all
of God’s commandments in the Torah.

However, such moral guidance is only credible when it comes from someone
who loves his people and knows much more of its tradition than Mr. Klinghoffer
displays in his highly selective reading of Scripture. Perhaps David Klinghoffer
in his heart does really love his (and God’s) people—I hope he does—but,
alas, his article evidences no such love. It is an angry tirade against
Reform Jews, Conservative Jews, secularist Jews—and even Orthodox Jews,
whom he singles out for charges of moral hypocrisy at the beginning of
his article. Perhaps Mr. Klinghoffer despairs of his people—the feeling
is quite understandable. But if his love of God does not entail love of
Israel—as we exist here and now—it does not seem to be true love for our
God after all. Does David Klinghoffer love any Jews?

And, finally, there is the theological offense of this article, an article
that comes from one who "believe[s] the Bible comes to us from God
and his prophets." (Oh, that more Jewish intellectuals were to say
that!) But that reading of Scripture is dangerously flawed, for it assumes
that because the prophets could connect our suffering with the direct intervention
of God in history, any reader of Scripture can do the same. The fact is,
though, that this type of judgment is only done selectively in Scripture
itself (cf. Deuteronomy 25:17-19; Esther 3:8-9). Furthermore, it can be
done only by a bona-fide prophet. "For the Lord God does not do anything
of which He has not revealed his secret purpose to His servants the prophets"
(Amos 3:7). In other words, only a prophet knows, because God has revealed
it to him or her, exactly what God has done in history. And
that revelation is not a matter of theoretical insight as much as it is
a matter of practical urgency. The prophet is to teach the people in a
uniquely prophetic way the specific workings of God in history and how
we are to actively respond to them in a way pleasing to God. But those
who are not prophets have no right to speak as if they were prophets; in
fact, they are guilty if they do so (see Deuteronomy 18:21-22).

Furthermore, according to the Talmud there are no more prophets in Israel
since the destruction of the Second Temple (70 C.E.). So the Talmud teaches
that the moral authority of the prophets has now passed to the Rabbis,
but the Rabbis do not have prophetic revelation. They can only reason about
God’s law; they cannot tell us what are God’s specific acts. That is why
the Talmud also teaches that the prophetic way of speaking is now "given
to idiots and infants." Accordingly, we should listen to the Rabbis
and emulate their reasoned approach and not pretend to be the prophets
we are not, and who all level-headed adults know they are not. And it was
the Rabbis who taught us that the specific acts of God, which are His constant
judgment of us, can be understood only in the world-to-come. In this world,
we can only have faith in God’s justice, but not knowing it we cannot discern
its true effects and how it is directly connected to human action in the
world. Along these lines, I fully concur with Mr. Klinghoffer’s indictment
of the "impotent" (I would have said "insipid") God
proposed by Rabbi Harold Kushner in his best selling books, precisely because
a God who does not judge us is not much of a God at all; indeed, such a
more likable "god" may well be a human creation. Nevertheless,
to claim to know how God judges from the belief that God
judges us is a theological non sequitur. Here prophecy is the excluded
middle.

For traditional Jews, there are two Torahs, not just one. Scripture
comprises the Written Torah and the whole rabbinic tradition comprises
the Oral Torah. Scripture can be read in a variety of ways, but on any
serious issue, especially one having practical results, Scripture must
be read in a way that is consistent with the teachings of "our sages,
may their memory be blessed." But David Klinghoffer has not done that.
That is a serious sin. In this sense, he very much resembles the Karaites,
a heretical Jewish sect who have rejected the authority of the whole rabbinic
tradition, opting instead for their literal reading of Scripture. May David
Klinghoffer repent of this sin; and may God forgive his sin, heal the hurt
it has caused, and direct his undoubtedly genuine faith in paths that reflect
proper love for God, his people Israel, and our authoritative historical
tradition.

David Novak
Jewish Studies Program
University of Toronto

David Klinghoffer would have readers believe that anti-Semitism in the
United States is dead. He goes so far as to equate the fear of anti-Semitism
with the traditional fear that the sun will not rise tomorrow. Unfortunately,
Mr. Klinghoffer’s analysis is incorrect, superficial, and misguided. One
may express concerns about current manifestations of anti-Semitism and
not be paranoid.

While it is clear that institutionalized anti-Semitism in education,
housing, and the workplace is no longer prevalent, it would be rash to
suggest that anti-Semitism is completely absent from American life. Today,
different forms of anti-Semitism still confront American Jews. A 1992 nationwide
survey conducted for the Anti-Defamation League found that about one-in-five
Americans hold views that are disturbingly anti-Semitic. Moreover, in 1997
over 1,500 incidents of anti-Semitism were reported to ADL—many of which
included acts of violence, intimidation, and harassment. Though the total
number of incidents has declined in recent years, it is important to remember
that every single act of anti-Semitism, however "insignificant,"
leaves an indelible mark.

Theories of Jewish power and Jewish control over the media continue
to be propagated by anti-Semitic and extremist groups. Louis Farrakhan’s
Nation of Islam for example, continues to espouse various anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories about the Jewish people. Violent extremist groups—such
as the New Order and Aryan Republican Army—have shown how anti-Semitic
and racist beliefs can lead to potential death and devastation if left
unchecked. Finally, the growth of the Internet has given many bigots a
much larger and more readily accessible audience for spreading anti-Semitic
and racist vitriol, particularly among the young and uninformed.

Ignoring these facts and simply retreating from the front lines is not
a tenable option. Taken to its ultimate conclusion, Mr. Klinghoffer’s argument
leads to inaction and paralysis in the face of anti-Semitism. However,
as long as the traditional Jewish concept of not relying on miracles continues
to hold sway, organized Jewry and the ADL will continue the fight against
anti-Semitism.

Kenneth Jacobson
Assistant National Director
Anti-Defamation League
New York, NY

I guess the Nuremberg trials were a big mistake. This conclusion follows
from the outrageous argument made by David Klinghoffer in his "Anti-Semitism
Without Anti-Semites," wherein he tells us that "while it would
be a presumption to assert that God caused the Holocaust . . . in order
to punish European Jews for their . . . secularism . . . it would also
be a presumption, and a worse one, to assert that such a punishment was
not what He had in mind."

There are today, living among us, Holocaust survivors who saw their
own children murdered before their eyes by Nazi soldiers and their collaborators.
The Vatican has recently described the Holocaust as "an unspeakable
tragedy" in which "women and men, old and young, children and
infants . . . were degraded, ill-treated, tortured and utterly robbed of
their human dignity, and then murdered." But David Klinghoffer wants
us to understand this as punishment inflicted by God because people were
not religious enough. Not that those who were inadequately punctilious
in their ritual observance were murdered; it is rather that because European
Jews strayed, as a group, from the straight and narrow that they were punished
collectively. So to that survivor who mourns that murdered child, Mr. Klinghoffer
offers this: perhaps you missed a few Sabbath services too many, or perhaps
your neighbor did.

I am too dim to grasp how this argument can be made by one human being
to another, and especially by one Jew to another. I am a believing and
practicing Jew, although not as observant as Mr. Klinghoffer. He has in
recent years become a Reform Jew, then a Conservative Jew, and now Orthodox.
This is wonderful. What is not wonderful, what is horrible, is his willingness
to argue that the murder of six million of his fellow Jews was God’s punishment
of the non-Orthodox. Mr. Klinghoffer writes that this reflects the "collective
responsibility" of all Jews for each other. His theory of collective
responsibility seems to run like this: I sin, God properly decides to have
the Nazis kill your child. I would have thought that collective responsibility
included mourning the six million who were brutally murdered, comforting
their survivors, and punishing their murderers. Mr. Klinghoffer’s argument
offers not collective responsibility but a ghastly sectarianism that blames
secular Jews—and credits God—for Hitler’s work. This is not Orthodoxy,
but blasphemy.

Elliott Abrams
Ethics and Public Center
Washington D.C.

In "Anti-Semitism Without Anti-Semites," David Klinghoffer
takes his people to task for a number of sins and transgressions. Applying
a narrow and literal interpretation of the Bible, he then proposes a theory
about the Holocaust that has something offensive to say to everyone: Jews,
non-Jews, and even God.

Mr. Klinghoffer does raise some genuine concerns. It is true that there
are some Jews who pay greater homage to the Holocaust than they do to God.
Some expend an enormous amount of time compiling evidence on incidents
of anti-Semitism, while ignoring their own sins. And some Jews have succumbed
to the "Cult of Victimhood," believing themselves to be morally
superior by mere virtue of their suffering. To explain this phenomenon,
Mr. Klinghoffer offers the simple hypothesis that Jews are obsessed with
anti-Semitism and the Holocaust because they have a "guilty conscience"
for failing to live their faith in strict observance of the laws of Torah.
. . .

Like the friends of Job, Mr. Klinghoffer seems unable to believe that
bad things can happen to good people; ergo, the people must have been guilty
of some monstrous sin to warrant a tragedy as horrible as the Holocaust.
While hedging his cruel assertion with an admission that "we can never
know God’s true intention," he goes on to suggest that it is not outside
the realm of possibility that "God caused the Holocaust, or allowed
it to happen, in order to punish European Jewry for their increasingly
widespread devotion to secularism."

As for us Christians, is it Mr. Klinghoffer’s contention that we are
just "chopped liver" in the eyes of our Lord? Are Christians
some type of inferior people, created as mere pawns to be used by God to
affect the lives of the Jews? This may come as a shock to Mr. Klinghoffer,
but we Christians believe that we have also been created in God’s image,
that we have entered into our own covenant with God, and through the Incarnation
of Jesus Christ, that we too have been offered an opportunity to partake
of the divine. . . .

In the words of Abraham Heschel, "Out of the darkness comes a voice
disclosing that the ultimate mystery is not an enigma but the God of mercy;
that the Creator of all is the "Father in Heaven." . . . The
human species is too powerful, too dangerous to be a mere toy or a freak
of the Creator. In his reason he may be limited, in his will he may be
wicked, yet he stands in a relation to God which he may betray but not
sever and which constitutes the essential meaning of his life. He is the
knot in which heaven and earth are interlaced."

Polly Goldberg
West Lafayette, IN

The opinion by David Klinghoffer did not come off as he probably intended
it. First, it embodies a stunning contradiction. On the one hand, he says
that fears of anti-Semitism are exaggerated; on the other, he warns of
terrible punishments to come.

At the root of this contradiction lie two horribly wrong theses. The
first is a thesis of collective guilt, including the proposition that,
as a rule, a whole group suffers for the sins of a few individuals. Yet,
in fact, innocent groups often suffer unaccountably for no sin of their
own. There is no "law" of collective guilt.

The second horrible thesis is that when Gentiles do evil to the Jews,
they are acting as instruments of God. This is a terrible accusation against
Gentiles. In addition, it seems to suggest that those who do evil are not
fully culpable for the evil they do, merely an instrument of an irresistible
power. In fact, when Christians do evil to Jews, it is a doubly vicious
act; it is like a young man doing evil to his older brother.

Finally, the picture of God that Mr. Klinghoffer presents is far too
primitive. The questions he chooses to wrestle with are enormous and tormenting,
but he has taken some trails that show how not to address them. There is
evidence in the essay that his intentions are better than his execution.

Michael Novak
Washington, D.C.

Considering that the April edition of First Things arrived in my mailbox
within a day or two of the buffoonish Jewish holiday of Purim, I might
be forgiven for thinking at first that David Klinghoffer’s piece, "Anti-Semitism
Without Anti-Semites," was a Purim Torah—that seasonal genre
of Jewish literature that combines one part religious erudition for every
nine parts farce. What else indeed could be made of an article that repeats
the important but by now tiresome critique of silly fear-mongering in the
fundraising appeals of some national Jewish organizations, but then devotes
the bulk of its space to propounding as "the authentic Jewish view"
a hateful proposition (God ordained the Holocaust in response to Jewish
sinfulness) which the contemporary Jewish community universally condemns
as an obscenity?

Many Jewish thinkers of the past half-century have noted the irony that
it was the European Jewish communities steeped in traditional piety that
were all carefully annihilated, one by one, in the flames of the German
Holocaust. In contrast, the millions of liberal and secular Jews in America,
who had quickly and joyfully cast off the yoke of Jewish law and tradition,
escaped entirely unharmed and were left unhindered in their creation, as
Mr. Klinghoffer notes, of the most secure and prosperous Jewish community
in the three thousand years of our existence as a people. Together with
the unprecedented enormity of the Jewish suffering of this period, this
fact was sufficient to eradicate along with the Six Million a particular
strain of Jewish thought that Mr. Klinghoffer, entirely alone among Jews,
wishes to resurrect in its crudest form.

It is true, as Mr. Klinghoffer asserts, that a prominent theodicy of
the Hebrew Bible explains collective Jewish suffering as God’s punishment
for the people’s sins. This is the view expressed in, for example, Deuteronomy
11:13-25 and 28:1-68, and it is indeed a rather harsh and simple one: If
Israel obeys God, Israel will be blessed; if Israel disobeys, God will
punish the people with one or more instances of plague, famine, military
invasion, and exile. Yet the Bible speaks in many voices, and offers a
strikingly different theodicy in Job, for example, and in some of Psalms,
both equally canonical to Deuteronomy in traditional Judaism. In Job 42:7
God Himself is shown explicitly to reject the Deuteronomic view of Jewish
suffering that Mr. Klinghoffer asserts. And it’s a good thing, for otherwise
Mr. Klinghoffer might logically have had to conclude that the religiously
observant European Jews were the sinners while we rich and carefree American
Jews merit divine favor. God indeed may not "practice precision bombing"
in dispensing catastrophic punishment, as Mr. Klinghoffer claims, but surely
the Almighty’s aim is not so poor as to hit the exact opposite of his proper
target—six million times over.

This is of course to say nothing of the further 2,500 years of development
in Jewish thought and practice since the biblical canon was closed. It
is curious to say the least that an Orthodox Jew like Mr. Klinghoffer would
join forces with those who stereotype Judaism as an ossified anachronism,
unchanged since the cruel and unmerciful days of the Old Testament. This
centuries-old Christian slander has found an unlikely ally in Mr. Klinghoffer,
who ignores the fundamental rabbinic principle of halakha k’vatraei—Judaism
stands according to the views of its contemporary authorities and interpreters.

One such authority who surely has greater standing to reflect on the
significance of the Holocaust for Jewish theodicy than Mr. Klinghoffer
is Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmas Shapira, the spiritual leader of the Warsaw Ghetto
who perished as a martyr in 1943. Certainly no mushy modernist or theological
liberal of the sort Klinghoffer scathingly accuses of abandoning the authentic
Jewish view by portraying an "impotent" God, "weeping quietly
in some corner of Heaven," Shapira was a Hasidic rebbe and heir to
the rabbinic dynasty of the Polish shtetl Piaseczno. Yet in his sermon
of February 14, 1942, which survived the destruction of the Ghetto hidden
in a buried milk can, Shapira explains the Holocaust in terms that the
liberal Rabbi Harold Kushner would recognize. The rebbe by then had already
rejected the view that the current torments were a punishment for Jewish
sins, because the Nazi cruelties had made prayer, study and the performance
of other mitzvot much more difficult, thus contradicting the nuanced traditional
understanding that divine chastisements are intended to punish but also
to lead Jews back to God. Instead, Shapira drew on the material of an ancient
countertradition found in the Talmud, in traditional Jewish mystical texts,
and in the Bible as well (the reference in Isaiah to God’s "hiding
his face")—all to teach that when a Jew suffers he does not do so
alone, for God himself weeps for him and "is afflicted (even) much
more than the person is."

David H. Osachy
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
Wyncote, PA

In his article, David Klinghoffer offers himself to the reader as part
social critic, part therapist, and part biblical interpreter. He is somewhat
more successful in the first of these three roles than he is in the other
two.

It is true that there is something strange about the preoccupation of
contemporary American Jews with anti-Semitism and what Klinghoffer calls
the near obsession with the Holocaust. He is also correct in saying that
its strangeness derives from the near absence of vigorous anti-Semitism
in most important American quarters (though not perhaps among African-Americans).
Why then, he asks, do Jews not recognize this? Or if, as he observes, they
probably do, why do they act as if this were not sufficient unto the day?
Why do they act as if virulent anti-Semitism was about to reemerge and
why, in particular, are they obsessed about the Holocaust? Is this not,
he asks, a simply irrational fear and obsession?

Mr. Klinghoffer offers a number of answers. Some have a certain force.
But this is in part vitiated by the fact that he does not credit the first
and most important answer: the fact that the decline of American anti-Semitism
has a great deal to do with the Holocaust and that American Jews have some
powerful if inarticulate sense of that. When American troops liberated
Buchenwald, General Eisenhower, responding to questions frequently raised
before and during the war about the propriety of American involvement,
declared to the troops that they now knew what they had been fighting against.
This not only settled the status of the war but helped to determine the
future status of racism within American society. The racism of the 1930’s,
including its anti-Semitism, was no longer legitimate because it was now
associated with the horror of the Holocaust. Its decline, then, was in
effect partially paid for by the blood of our dead European sisters and
brothers, and we contemporary Jews somehow know this.

It is no doubt ugly that we American Jews go on trading on their blood.
But the temptations to do so have been enormous beginning with the sense
that our benign status in contemporary America has its origin in American
horror at the Holocaust and fear that such horror will fade over time.
Moreover, if anti-Semitism has steadily declined in America, such is not
the case worldwide, where beginning with the Six-Day War, it has enjoyed
renewed legitimacy. Hence it goes too far to say that American Jewish concern
with anti-Semitism is simply irrational.

There are other and less respectable temptations as well. Among the
other temptations, Mr. Klinghoffer is surely correct in emphasizing what
he calls the cult of victimhood and its perverse effect on our national
life. No doubt we should not yield to this temptation.

Mr. Klinghoffer is also correct that there are other objections to be
made to our obsession with the Holocaust. It is, as he implies, the flip
side of our appalling ignorance of most things Jewish, including and perhaps
especially the Bible. All this is regrettable, but is it really pathological?
Above all is it remediable in the ways he suggests?

I will leave an assessment of his psychoanalysis to the appropriate
experts. But his foray into biblical interpretation offers no remedy and
is itself appalling.

He observes that the Bible has nothing to say about anti-Semitism. That
is true for the simple reason that it did not exist. It took the nineteenth
century to invent it and some pedant of the time to name it. It may be
true that the Bible has a more profound understanding of human evil than
ours. That at least is my view. But Mr. Klinghoffer’s account makes it
hard to see what the difference is and learn from it. His doctrine of collective
responsibility, allegedly of biblical origin, resembles by its collectivism
modern racism’s notions of collective inferiority and impurity. In the
end, he says, it was not the Nazis who were "responsible" for
the Holocaust but the European Jews. But does not responsibility require
the capacity to make choices, and is it not obvious that the Nazis had
more freedom to choose than the European Jews whom they murdered? Mr. Klinghoffer’s
account seems to have the effect of importing modern racist doctrine into
the Bible itself. If his account is true it is hard to see what we have
gained by our recourse to the ancient wisdom of the Bible. If it is not
true it has only served to confuse matters further.

As Mr. Klinghoffer reads it, the Bible presents no examples of Jewish,
or more accurately Israelite, suffering that are undeserved. Everything
they suffered was deserved. But this is simply untrue. Nor are examples
of undeserved suffering obscure, beginning with the enslavement of the
Israelites in Egypt, whose suffering and liberation we Jews will lament
and celebrate at Passover. To this may be added the assault of the Amalekites
on the Israelites in the desert and the viciousness of their heir, Haman,
of whom we hear at Purim. Were it not for these events and others like
them we could not read in the Psalms that "For Thy sake they have
been killing us all the day long; we are considered as sheep for slaughter"
(Psalm 44:23). The whole psalm deserves Mr. Klinghoffer’s attention.

Mr. Klinghoffer admits that there may be a presumption in the kind of
speculation in which he engages. Indeed there is a presumption, a presumption
described in an important biblical passage. "The secret things belong
to the Lord. The things which are revealed to us and our children forever
are to do all the things of this Torah" (Deuteronomy 29:29). The ultimate
understanding of the Holocaust must surely be, in the Bible’s view, one
of the hidden things, and it is just as surely presumptuous of Mr. Klinghoffer
to offer us the divine understanding of the matter. It is also heartless.

If it is not simply forbidden to us to try to understand the Holocaust,
if we cannot help but try to understand it, it is because the "secret
things" are not entirely secret; they are not simply ‘in heaven’ or
"beyond the sea" (Deuteronomy 30:12-13). They are human, perhaps
all-too-human, but Mr. Klinghoffer would do better to stick to that. As
I said, it may be ugly for us American Jews to trade on the murder of our
European brothers and sisters. But Mr. Klinghoffer’s response is no solution.
Rather it unjustly and impiously defiles their memory.

Hillel Fradkin
Milwaukee, WI

David Klinghoffer is to be commended for his opposition to the preoccupation
with the Holocaust that has taken hold of American Jewry in recent years
and, in most instances, usurped the central place that ought to go (and
traditionally went) to the study and practice of Torah. He is also correct
both to say that "it would . . . be a presumption to assert that God
caused the Holocaust, or allowed it to happen, in order to punish European
Jewry for their increasingly widespread devotion to secularism" and
to note the important point that "[I]n any given historical event,
we can never know God’s true intention." He is too sweeping, however,
in his judgment that "the Jews of the Bible . . . understood Gentile
hostility to be an expression of God’s displeasure with us as a community."
This is certainly not the case with the anti-Semitism the Jews faced in
the Book of Esther, for example, and even in the prophets the possibility
that Israel is suffering unjustly is sometimes taken seriously and brought
to God’s attention. In short, in the Bible, not all suffering is punitive.

Rabbinic literature is usually more solicitous of the good name of the
people Israel than is the Bible. Mr. Klinghoffer may want to take note
of the midrash to the effect that Moses was denied entry into the Promised
Land because he called the people "rebels" or "fools"
(Numbers 20:10). If, "in any given historical event, we can never
know God’s true intention," we had best follow the rabbinic injunction
to judge others charitably—if at all.

Jon D. Levenson
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA

I have been a reader of First Things since the first year or so of its
publication. During that time I have found in it many things to disagree
with—but the April issue contains the first article that has actually made
me angry.

David Klinghoffer writes of the ancient Israelites that "believed
in collective responsibility." "That means that when individual
Jews do wrong and bring punishment down from Heaven, innocent Jews may
get caught up in the maelstrom . . . the guilty may escape punishment in
this world altogether, while the innocent die and must wait for their reward
in the world to come."

This is certainly not what ancient Jews believed, for there is no mention
of any "Heaven," or of any "Hell," anywhere in the
Old Testament. But what infuriated me personally Mr. Klinghoffer’s his
comment on the Holocaust, based upon this idea of "collective responsibility."

Does this mean that the egregious case of human evil represented by
Hitler and the Nazi movement had nothing to do with the murders and the
suffering of the Holocaust? Was it really all the fault of "reformers"
and "secularists" among European Jews, those classifications
into which Mr. Klinghoffer would place any Jew who does not meet his standards
of "piety," "religious observance," or purity of belief
(such as those ancient Israelites whom, he seems to think, believed in
a Christian heaven!)? . . .

Mr. Klinghoffer writes: "The difference between us and the Jews
of the Bible, and indeed the Jews of every generation until a century or
two ago, is this: They understood Gentile hostility to be an expression
of God’s displeasure with us as a community. We understand it to be essentially
meaningless."

The fact is that until a century or two ago just about everyone on earth
thought that such things as earthquakes and plagues were expressions of
the displeasure of some God, or gods. . . .

But I cannot see how any thoughtful Jew—or any thoughtful person of
any religious affiliation—could see Gentile hostility toward Jews, such
as that manifested in the Holocaust as meaningless. It clearly illustrates
what I find to be the Old Testament’s chief, and most useful, theme—that
of the limitless depths of human depravity and evil.

The Holocaust was neither an expression of divine displeasure, nor was
it "meaningless." It only showed on a gigantic scale that as
Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs not between Heaven
and Hell, but right through the middle of every human heart. It is this
which the Jews (and Christians) of the Bible understood. . . .

Edmund Weinmann
Huntington, NY

David Klinghoffer may be right in ascribing to modern Jews a paranoiac
"anti-Semitism without anti-Semites," or in saying that "in
America today there is probably less hostility to Jews . . . than at any
time in history," or in describing the Holocaust as God’s punishment
to Jews collectively for forsaking His ways. I happen to belong to that
minority he castigates for believing that the Holocaust was demonically
inspired—but of course Satan can only work when people have forsaken God
and His ways.

However, I think Mr. Klinghoffer is wide of the mark when he attributes
to Judaism the Cult of Victimhood. In fact, one could excise the word "Jews"
from his remarks about victimhood and come up with a valid judgment of
modern Christian (and other) America today:

We . . . have lost the consciousness of collective responsibility. .
. . We have quit teaching our children that God lives, that He loves us,
that He wants relationship with us—but that He wants something from us
in return. . . . We know, in our souls, that we have gone astray; but .
. . we are in denial. . . . Any hostility we can detect . . . is entirely
unmerited. We have done nothing to deserve it. God isn’t angry with us.
. . . We don’t live like . . . we should, but that’s alright. God doesn’t
mind. He isn’t going to punish us for our disobedience. . . .

The Jewish people have been likened to the canary in the coal mine:
it can predict what may happen to us if we don’t pay attention. Mr. Klinghoffer
finishes (rightly): "Anything can happen. And it just might."
And it applies to us Christians, in addition to—or perhaps more than—Jews.
God help us all.

Mary R. Carse
Hinesburg, VT

David Klinghoffer replies:

Good heavens. Well, any reader in search of high drama in the genre
of letters-to-the-editor has come to the right place. In the above responses,
along with the article I wrote I am tagged with such words as "horrible,"
"ghastly," "blasphemy," "appalling," "racist,"
"heartless," "impious," "hateful," "primitive,"
"cruel," and "evil." Not since college, when I criticized
the Third World Center in the campus newspaper, have I been the target
of such a hail of colorful nouns and adjectives. Regretably, First Things
was unable to reproduce my favorite response to the piece, with the name
of its author, since it came to my private e-mail address. This one darkly
warned that I had better "recant what you said about the Holocaust.
. . . Based on long experience, I would say that if you don’t do that immediately,
you will never live this article down and even your friends (a fortiori
your enemies) in the Jewish community will desert you." The writer
does not indicate who these "friends" might be, individuals who
will abandon a comrade for ideological errors without even first having
identified themselves to him. For sheer trumped-up melodrama, this e-mail
wins the grand prize.

However David Novak’s letter deserves special recognition, too, perhaps
an engraved tub of schmaltz, which he flings at me by the handful in the
form of his friend Sol of the tattooed arm. Whenever you want to impugn
the moral instincts of somebody who disagrees with you, there is no more
tempting weapon to wave about than a disfigured Auschwitz survivor. But
it comes as a surprise that a scholar of depth and sobriety like Rabbi
Novak should resort to such tactics. In fact his aria-length contribution
is far less serious and more exaggeratedly rhetorical than I would have
expected from him, often in amusing ways. I particularly like the quivering
paragraph, worthy of the operatic stage, which he concludes by asking "Does
David Klinghoffer love any Jews?" He proceeds to invoke no less than
the sin of false prophecy, a capital crime in Jewish law. (To my relief,
Rabbi Novak has assured me he doesn’t actually think I deserve the death
penalty.)

Speaking of my sins, it would appear they also include the high crime
of being, in Rabbi Novak’s opinion, an insufficiently ardent Zionist, a
fault he extrapolates from my observation that America is safer for Jews
than Israel is. Does he mean that, as an ardent Zionist himself, he thinks
it’s safer to be a Jew in Israel, where Jews get blown up, shot at, and
knifed every month precisely for being Jews? Doesn’t he read the newspapers?
In America there is almost no place that I would want to visit where out
of fear I would feel obliged to take off my yarmulke; whereas on recent
trips to Israel, in order to avoid hostile Arab attention, I’ve found myself
taking it off frequently. (The experience of most American Jews effectively
enough rebuts the alleged statistical proofs of significant levels of anti-Semitism
in American life adduced by Kenneth Jacobson of the ADL.)

Finally, there is Rabbi Novak’s culminating passage which falls into
the category of the tochachah, a rabbinic term meaning a formal
rebuke and call to repentance. According to Jewish law, such an admonition
is not to be delivered in public unless the admonisher has already attempted
unsuccessfully in private, which Rabbi Novak did not. For reasons that
are unclear to me, he doesn’t seem to feel that limitation applies in this
case.

Some other noteworthy responses include Elliott Abrams’, on the one
hand, and Michael Novak and David H. Osachy’s, on the other, which I find
puzzling for different reasons. In his recent, important book Faith
and Fear, Mr. Abrams bravely and intelligently assails the trend toward
venerating the Holocaust, so he was the last person from whom I’d expect
a letter like the one he’s written. Like David Novak, he misrepresents
my argument. I specifically did not assert that the Holocaust was "a
punishment inflicted by God"; I did specifically say that we can never
know such a thing, at least not in this world. Anyone who takes the Bible
seriously, however, will have to admit that history is not meaningless
and the Lord does sometimes operate in the world in ways that, to us ignorant
humans, seem pointless or cruel. God has created the world in such a way
that our sins can bring about circumstances from which horrible sufferings
arise—for us, or for other people. This is one of the persistent themes
of the Bible. That a wise writer and a serious Jew like Elliott Abrams
regards my articulation of that theme as "blasphemous" can only
mean that in some way I failed to make myself clear.

He declares that, if I am right in the arrogant assertion he attributes
to me, then "the Nuremburg trials were a big mistake." But even
if I had said what he says I did, that wouldn’t logically follow. Consider,
as Hillel Fradkin suggests, the Book of Exodus. Contrary to what he writes,
the Jews did not fall into Egyptian slavery by chance. God sent us there
for his own pedagogical reasons, including one that the Passover Haggadah
alludes to. We are told that Israel went down to Egypt because we were
"anoos al pi ha’dibur," literally, compelled by the mouth
of utterance. A tradition explains that this means it was the sin of Joseph—who
bad-mouthed his brothers, who in turn got wind of it and kidnapped and
enslaved him—that resulted in the enslavement of the entire Jewish people,
innocent and otherwise. And the Bible tells us explicitly that God hardened
the heart of the Egyptian king, thus prolonging our servitude. In some
sense the Egyptians were acting at God’s behest. Yet when the Egyptian
army was destroyed at the Sea of Reeds, their own Nuremberg, it was an
occasion for singing songs of praise to God. When God employs a bad man
to teach someone else a truth by making him suffer, the Bible sees no contradiction
in His then punishing the former individual for being the type of sinner
whom God would employ for such a purpose in the first place. (Polly Goldberg,
please take note. This doesn’t make the Egyptians "chopped liver"
either. Jews and Gentiles alike are created in the Lord’s image, all of
us actors in the divine drama of human history; but that doesn’t mean God
just kicks back and enjoys the show without intervening and directing us
as He sees fit.)

Michael Novak and David Osachy, if I read them correctly, regard the
biblical idea of collective responsibility as excessively "primitive"
(Novak) or reminiscent of the "cruel and unmerciful days of the Old
Testament" (Osachy). Mr. Novak is a Christian thinker. Mr. Osachy
styles himself a rabbi, though his Reconstruction Movement has long taken
a skeptical view (to put it mildly) of the Jewish belief in a personal
God, a skepticism which negates the traditional idea of a rabbi as carrier
of the oral tradition revealed by God at Sinai. He would have us understand
that more advanced forms of Western religious faith have developed in the
past 2,500 years (actually it is some 3,300 years since the Revelation
at Sinai) so as to leave behind the "cruel and unmerciful" legacy
of the Hebrew Bible, and Mr. Novak seems to agree. But that would make
Judaism and Christianity a sort of two-headed fraud, since each religion
has always taken the truth of the Bible as its foundation. It is an intellectually
coherent option to reject the biblical understanding of God, but if that
is what Novak and Osachy mean to do in their respective letters, I don’t
see why they have felt moved to enter this discussion. The question we
are considering here takes as a given that God lives and that He is the
same God whose revelation is recorded in the Hebrew Bible.

Hillel Fradkin and Jon D. Levenson dispute my contention that the Bible
consistently presents God as punishing the Jews, or allowing us to be punished,
through the medium of Gentiles. They mention several episodes in Scripture
where Gentile hostility seems unrelated to any Jewish moral failing. Here
my correspondents usefully remind me of something I had neglected to mention:
namely, that the Bible is a cryptic text and was never meant to be read
like a newspaper. Rabbi Novak accuses me of rejecting the Oral Torah—without
which, as he and I agree, the Written Torah and the rest of the Bible are
largely incomprehensible. (Edmund Weinmann should keep that in mind the
next time he wants to blithely and categorically state that the Jews of
the Bible "certainly" did not believe in this or that "because
there is no mention [of the matter] anywhere in the Old Testament.")
But the truth is that, as I should have stated explicitly, the authentic
Jewish understanding of the role of hostile non-Jews appears even more
clearly in oral tradition than it does in Scripture itself.

Take for instance the cases of Amalek and Haman. Amalek, no mere extinct
desert tribe but the embodiment of a world view that sees the universe
as a place ruled by randomness rather than the will of God, first struck
the wandering Israelites at "Rephidim" (Exodus 17:8). But that
word refers to no identifiable location in the vicinity of the Sinai wilderness.
Rather, it signifies a spiritual condition; a midrash explains it as a
contraction of the Hebrew "rafu yedehem min ha’torah,"
"they loosened their grip on the Torah." As the biblical commentator
Rashi notes, in the preceding verse we find certain Israelites asking among
themselves "Is the Lord among us, or not?"—within weeks of their
miraculous departure from Egypt and the splitting of the Sea of Reeds!
The oral tradition is very clear that the Jews became vulnerable to Amalek’s
physical assault because they had already begun to assimilate the Amalekite
philosophy, which, it is worth noticing, bears an eerie resemblance to
modern secularism.

The same applies to Haman and the Purim story, as related in the Book
of Esther. Of course in that event not a single Jewish life was lost, but
an opinion in the Talmud, repository of the oral tradition, takes for granted
that "the Jews of that generation deserved extermination." Why?
Their spiritual condition is symbolized by a feast described in the first
chapter of Esther, hosted by the wicked king Ahasuerus. Regarding the Jews
who were present at the feast, the Talmud emphasizes that they enjoyed
themselves. They might have felt compelled to eat, but not to rejoice in
their hearts with their evil lord. God hardened Pharoach heart, but one
point of the tale of the feast is that these Jews appear to have hardened
their own. For that, disaster nearly overtook not only the Jews on hand
that day but all the Jews in the kingdom.

A final objection raised against me has to do with what some of the
writers above (Elliott Abrams, David Novak, Polly Goldberg) regard as a
hardness in my own heart. Comments Mr. Abrams, "So to that survivor
who mourns that murdered child, Mr. Klinghoffer offers this: perhaps you
missed a few Sabbath services too many, or perhaps your neighbor did."
It would of course be monstrous as well as moronic of me to say anything
like that to anyone at all, but Mr. Abrams does raise a valid question:
Should these matters be discussed at all, for fear of creating hurt feelings
on the part of Holocaust survivors? As a rabbi I know put it to me after
he had read my article, "If you broke your leg and ended up in the
hospital you might well ask yourself what if anything God was trying to
tell you. But if you broke your leg and I came to visit you at the hospital
and urged you to think about what God was trying to tell you, that would
be inappropriate." It would indeed, which is why, if I may be permitted
to join David Novak in hoisting up a Holocaust survivor of my own, I would
not venture to share my thoughts on this subject with, for instance, my
landlady: a stout seventysomething who as a girl was pushed by her older
sister off a train on its way to a Nazi death camp. Nor would I discuss
it with Sol.

Instead, I wrote an article in an ecumenical monthly read mainly by
scholarly Gentiles, but also, as the above letters demonstrate, by Jews,
and in fact precisely the kind of Jews—intellectually mature, influential
in the wider Jewish community—that I most wanted to reach. While the large
number of reactions I’ve received to the article from Jewish intellectual
types has caused me to reevaluate my assumptions about the readership of
First Things, I assure you that my landlady does not read FT, and I take
it that Sol doesn’t either. One could argue that it would have been better
to publish the article in a Jewish magazine, but then it likely would have
been read by some Holocaust survivors who are not worldly intellectuals,
and that would have made me uneasy. It might well upset someone with direct
experience of the camps or the war, but without experience of the sometimes
rough-and-tumble discourse of opinion-journal articles. Practically speaking,
the alternative to saying what I did where I did would have been not to
say it all.

The point of the article, incidentally, had to do with the Holocaust
only in a marginal way. Alas, almost none of my correspondents (excepting
Hillel Fradkin and Mary R. Carse) bothers even to mention, much less address,
its main theme—a psychological explanation of the Jewish obsession with
phantom anti-Semitism. Instead, all of the above focused on a single paragraph.
I urge anyone who is interested to go back and read the original article
and see what all the fuss wasn’t about.